Republicans are criticizing the effort, cry for socialized space industry

At
around 2:35 p.m. on Friday, nine engines fired, propelling the
154-ft. SpaceX Falcon 9 from the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in
Florida into a fiery sprint through the Earth's atmosphere.
Minutes later, the first stage fell off, dropping into the Atlantic
Ocean, while a second stage fired, delivering a dummy payload into
orbit 155 miles above Earth. For SpaceX, the mission
was picture perfect
-- a happy ending to years of struggles.

SpaceX was founded in
2002 by tech-pioneer Elon Musk who serves as the company's CEO and
CTO. Musk, also CEO of Tesla Motors, sunk $100M USD of his own
PayPal fortune into the company.

The company first saw
success in
September 2008 with the launch of its Falcon 1 rocket
powered by its Merlin (first stage) and Kestrel (second stage)
engines. On July 14, 2009, a Falcon 1 rocket delivered
its first
commercial payload -- the Malaysian RazakSAT satellite.
Those successes came after a fair share of failures -- the first
three launches of the Falcon 1 proved unsuccessful.

Today,
SpaceX is offering Falcon 1 launches for $8.9M USD, with slight
discounts for mass contracts. The Falcon 9, launched Friday, is
the next stage in its bid for commercial space dominance.

The
Falcon 9 is designed to carry much higher payloads. Where as
the Falcon 1 can deliver 670 kg to low earth orbit (LEO), the Falcon
9 "heavy" variant can deliver 29 tons of cargo to low Earth
orbit.

The first stage of the Falcon 9 is powered by 9 first
stage Merlin 1C rockets which burn liquid oxygen (LOX) and
rocket-grade kerosene (RP-1) propellants. Those rockets are
fired by dual redundant pyrophoric triethylaluminum-triethylborane
(TEA-TEB) igniters. The first stage can produce 4.94 MN of
thrust and 304 sec (3.0 kN/kg) of specific impulse in
vacuum.

A carbon fiber aluminum core
composite structure joins the first and second stages. The
design is made more affordable as the engine used in the second stage
engine is identical to those found in the first, albeit with a
smaller fuel tank and only a single engine. The second stage
engine has a burn time of 345 s.

At a press conference, CEO
Musk commented,
"I hope people don’t put too much emphasis on our success
because it’s simply not correct to have the fate of commercial
launch depend on what happens in the next few days. But it certainly
does add to the pressure. There’s more weight on our shoulders
because of that. I wish there weren’t."

The issue of
the commercialization of the space industry has created an unusual
role reversal for the Democrats and Republicans in Washington D.C.
President Obama, amid criticism about "nationalizing" the
automobile industry is charging ahead with plans to privatize the
space industry, a move long championed by the U.S. Armed Forces.
Under his leadership, NASA has pledged $3.5B USD in contracts to
SpaceX and Orbital Transportation Services, a rival
firm.

Republicans are decrying
the denationalization effort and the delays that have
ensued. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas,
commented after the Friday launch, "Make no mistake even
this modest success is more than a year behind schedule, and the
project deadlines of other private space companies continue to slip
as well."

SpaceX is deaf to the criticism, though, and is
turning its focus to continued commercialization of the Falcon 1 and
Falcon 9 platforms. It is also hard at work developing its
Dragon capsule, a manned vessel that can seat up to 7. The
capsule is expected to launch in a test flight aboard a Falcon 9
rocket, sometime this year or next. The craft utilizes PICA-X,
a proprietary variant of NASA's phenolic impregnated carbon ablator
material.